The_Search_for_Michael_K_in_Coetzee’S_Africa

Writers have a way of making history happen where it does not necessarily exist.J. M. Coetzee, a white South African writer, invents a sort of history that creates a catharsis in people about issues of Apartheid and South African oppression. On trying to overcome bondage and achieve freedom, Coetzee writes:I am someone who has intimations of freedom (as every chained prisoner has) and constructs representations—which are shadows themselves—of people slipping their chains and turning their faces to the light (Barnard).Coetzee’s intentions are not to entertain his readers with a fictional story of life in South Africa. Instead, he has the intention of giving to his readers a new perspective on the life of certain figures who struggle to overcome the chains that tie them to colonization and the governmental power of the European minority in South Africa.Coetzee’s Life in the Times of Michael K represents a struggle in which the main character journeys through a life of torment and ignorance.Coetzee uses techniques of postmodernist theory to convey the images of the narrator in this novel. One can see that through this theory, Coetzee explores the “intimations of freedom” by use of elements such as the deconstruction of society, participation, silence, anarchy, and a plot with no clear purpose. These elements set an ambiguous story line and give the reader a sense of liberation through exploration of the postmodernist’s perspective of self versus society.Life in the Times of Michael K takes place during the time of a civil war that is going on throughout South Africa. The novel starts in the village of Sea Point where Michael K, a disfigured, coloured man, lives with his mother. K is a gardener who was born with a facial deformity and has lived his entire life as an outcast from society. When his mother comes down with a serious illness, K succumbs to her request of taking her on a journey to her birthplace. After dodging many obstacles, K’s mother becomes violently ill and needs to be taken to a hospital. This hospital, K believes, is unfriendly and stand-offish. He is not allowed to see his mother until she dies and the hospital staff gives him her ashes. K takes the ashes and her personal belongings and proceeds with his journey, spending much time loitering around the countryside and villages he passes through.Michael gets to the village of Prince Albert, which is around the area of his mother’s birthplace. From there he travels to an abandoned farm, once owned by the Visagies. Seeing no one living here, he makes himself at home until one day an escaped soldier, the grandson of the Visagies, returns to the farmstead and asks K to help him hide and to go to town to buy him food. Along the way, Michael stashes the money and runs away to the hills, where he spends some time before being picked up and brought to a work camp, a place called Jakkalsdrif. After spending some time there, he escapes from the camp and goes back to the Visagie residence. He builds himself an underground shelter and plants pumpkin’s seeds. K is eventually found by the police, assumed to be providing for the enemies of the war.He is then sent to the refugee camp at Kenilsworth.The second part of the novel takes place at the refugee camp, or as the authorities refer to it, the reinforcement camp. This is told by the refugee camp doctor, who knows that Michael K is innocent and wants to help him survive. K refuses to eat and no matter what the doctor tries he will not give in to eating.The doctor develops a personal relationship with K, something he has never done before with an inmate.He tries to understand where Michael is coming from, and listens to the choppy versions of stories that he tells him. After much time, news is out that the war is getting worse and the rehabilitation camps are turning into internment camps. Soon after, Michael K escapes from the camp.The last part of the novel centers around Michael K’s return to Sea Point. He meets up with some travelers who offer him a place with them. They are running from the police, and try stealing from Michael K. K also has a sexual encounter with one of the women involved in the group. After this experience, he returns to the room that he used to stay in before leaving from Sea Point. He ends with a thought about the possibility of having to share the room with someone else, and imagines an old man whom he would take back to the country with him.Throughout the entire novel, Coetzee has an underlying theme of peace and liberation. K just wants to escape, to be content with the simple things in life. In so doing, he uses a style termed “postmodernism.” Postmodernism, as described by the Indiana University List of Critical Terms and definitions, is:A trend in modern art in which the creator de-emphasizes the mimetic and defamiliarizes the traditional generic forms. The work of art calls attention to itself as artificially constructed and claims itself to be a work of art and only a work of art without denying that art may have a function as social comment. Often the structural seams of the work are left visible and even highlighted and commented upon… (Hayward, “List of Critical Terms”)This definition highlights that the ideas of postmodernism are structural in a sense, but also very artistic and abstract.It also explains that traditional forms are not as important as breaking down what has been customary, and postmodernist trends steer away from many traditional forms. This style is used by Coetzee in his fiction to create a social statement through the use of art, and in a sense the style that he uses also breaks down structural barriers, thus creating a new sense of liberation. Another term very important to understand is “modernism,” or modernist thinking. Very closely related to postmodernism, modernism “is an experiment in finding the inner truths of a situation. It can be characterized by self-consciousness and reflexiveness” (quoted in Weiss).To better understand modernism and how it relates to Coetzee and his novels, a comparison can be made between certain elements of each of these two areas of thought.Modernism stresses purpose, postmodernism stresses play; modernism stresses distance, postmodernism, participation; hierarchy versus anarchy; creation and totalization versus deconstruction; and matery, logos versus exhaustion, silence.All of these elements are very important in the studies of modernism and postmodernism. There are more on this list, but because of the exhaustive research on Coetzee, it is impossible to look at every aspect of postcolonial themes. These aforementioned themes, however, are very prominent in Coetzee’s Life in the Times of Michael K, and are easier to connect to other works by J. M. Coetzee.One characteristic trait of postmodernism is the presence of play versus purpose.In many postmodernist works, there is no clearly defined purpose; rather the creator of that piece of work chooses to explore different directions of a given topic.In giving no clearly defined purpose, as modernist theory does, the author of the work will leave the reader to fill in the gaps of his or her work.Another trait of postmodernist writing is the concept of participation versus distance. The narrators in these novels play a large role in the society around them. He or she, directly or indirectly, is making a statement about their participation in the community at large.In modernist theory, distance is stressed more, and the issues of participating are less than in postmodernist theory.Anarchy also remains a common theme in postmodernist thought. As opposed to a hierarchy, the idea of an anarchical system denotes a broken system of government, a form of rebelliousness and chaos. In modernist theory, more hierarchical structures are emphasized and maintained. An anarchical system provides for the subtlety of a distant government that keeps its people in chains, and those people are the ones who compete for the power of the society.With the same concepts of anarchy in mind, deconstructionism also becomes a big issue in postmodernist thought. While in modernist theory creation and totalization would be emphasized, deconstruction is emphasizing the downfall of society. Instead of the current system of ways growing and becoming stronger and more defined, it becomes less structurally valued and leads to chaos, whether it be physical, emotional, or social. This destruction can be very subtle, and has the capability of happening over a long period of time.Shannon Weiss and Karla Wesley describe it by saying that “the effort of deconstruction examines what [the text] represses, what it does not say, and its incongruities… Deconstruction does not resolve inconsistencies, but rather exposes hierarchies involved for distillation of information” (Weiss).Destruction can also just be hinted at, while a society may seem to be getting stricter and more rigid, that may lead to destruction of it. In the trend of postmodernism, this process is not necessarily a bad thing, rather destructionism may lead to the ultimate goal that the society wants to achieve.The idea of exhaustion or silence within postmodernism is also an important issue.A very prominent theme in postmodernist thinking, the works of art associated with this issue often have the main subject or character very quiet in their ways and actions. The character is usually seen as an observer, a thinker, and someone who would like to voice his or her thoughts, but does not. Another way of looking at exhaustion and silence is by observing personified objects that may have a very looming and muted effect.These silent characters or objects are usually the ones who have the most to say. In their own way, they have the resounding voices in the novel.These various traits of postmodernist theory are very dominant traits in Coetzee’s novels.He uses them throughout his novels in referring to the larger theme of liberation throughout South Africa. In the novel, In the Life and Times of Michael K, Coetzee expresses these themes subtly but clearly.He also uses them in his Waiting for the Barbarians, stressing the importance of a quiet rebellion or liberation that has or will take place. The history being non-historical, Coetzee gives the reader a sense of universality in the plot and ideas the novel portrays. The first theme, a play on plot structure, relates directly with this idea.Coetzee has no clear purpose when writing Michael K other than making a statement about how life could be, and how life may be in certain situations in the oppressive life of the people in South Africa. Instead ofhaving a certain “moral” to the story, Coetzee shows his character on a journey, which represents not only a physical departure and return to a birthplace, but also a journey reflecting peace and finding oneself amidst life’s obstacles and obstructions. Many times in the novel, Michael K will find himself wandering around a village or countryside aimlessly searching for nothing and everything. After his mother passes away, for example, K stays in the town with the hospital. The narrator describes his actions as such:Though he had no business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital. By day he pushed the cart around the streets in the vicinity; by night he slept under culverts, behind hedges, in alleys (Coetzee Michael K 33).Instead of sticking to his original purpose, K stays near the hospital and does not really do much of anything in the time he is there.He does this often, in many of the places he visits, staying for many days at a time.Coetzee also plays with the idea of charity. Michael K is often seen as “receiving charity,” and one particular instance at the Jakkalsdrif Camp emphasizes this. He is talking with one of the other men at the camp, Robert, and Robert is telling him that he needs to start noticing things around him. He says, “ ‘You’ve been asleep all your life. It’s time to wake up. Why do you think they give you charity, you and the children' Because they think you are harmless, your eyes aren’t opened, you don’t see the truth around you’” (Coetzee Michael K 88-89).K’s mentality is referred to here, which is also part of the reason that he does not seem to have a clear desire to consistently pursue with his purpose of returning to his mother’s birthplace.Michael K’s dull intellect corresponds well with playing without a purpose in the postmodernist theory.Coetzee also plays with the plot when Michael K spends much of his time in his shelter at the Visagie residence. The repetition of his actions have no clear purpose or direction. Instead, Coetzee leaves his actions purposely ambiguous so the reader can decide for him- or herself why K would be behaving as such.This unclear, indefinite approach can also be seen at the end of his novel: the ambiguity and overall moral of the story are left to the reader to decide. This example will be discussed in more detail later.Not only does Coetzee use play as a means for expressing postcolonial theory, he also uses the issue of participation, as opposed to distance in his literature. Participation is the act of the characters in the novel playing a prominent participatory role in their society and environment. Even though this is common in many types of novels, the difference in postmodernist writing is that the characters almost become one with what is around them.Michael K, for example, refers to himself as a parent to the fruit he grows. He takes great care of them, and they become almost a part of him. When he decides he wants to leave the Visagie farm for the first time, he looks out across the field where his pumpkins are growing and thinks, “Now when I am most needed… I abandon my children” (Coetzee Michael K 63). Benita Parry describes this relationship as Michael attaining “an ineffable state of bliss” when he eats a pumpkin “he had reared in a parodic act of parental nurturing” (Perry 154). This closeness to nature gives K a great role in participating with the land and environment around him.In a more modernist reading, K may have been more distant from the land, and would not be caring so much for the plants that he started and are growing as if they were his own.K also participates in his surroundings in other ways. Using the earth as protection, he makes his home, a shelter in the ground. He uses this place to hide frequently from unwanted visitors on the farm. This, and his other uses of natural materials, brings him closer to the earth. He does not desire material goods, and when he leaves the hospital with his mother’s things, he just leaves them along the roadside instead of trying to sell them for spending money along the way. These actions take him closer to the earth, and become a very large part of Michael K’s identity and character.K participates not only in nature, but also in political issues. He is questioned by the authorities more than once, taken to two different camps, and pronounced a sort of political prisoner for supplying the other side with shelter and food. Even though K does not do anything in which he would deserve such treatment, he is still held and interrogated many times over.Michael K only desires to be freed from this persecution and bondage that is constantly thrust upon him and return to nature where he feels safe and secure, and free. This displays the theme of taking part in one’s society very well, and throughout the novel this part of society intertwines very much with the idea of postmodernism and reaching for the goal of freedom.Interwoven with the idea of participation seeking freedom is the idea of anarchy and being free from the hierarchical government in Michael K. Anarchy has an eminent role because of the society’s desire to overthrow the somewhat distant structure that holds them in set roles and rigid communities. Allowing for little or no change, the government can only be subtly seen throughout the course of the novel. Even though the authorities represent the government and its hold on the certain types of people of South Africa, the force behind them is still very distant, and the people in power seem merely players in a very strategic game of chance.The actual question is who controls the officials'The officials themselves are very unclear as to why they do what they do.This contributes to the confused nature of the chaos throughout society. The people, who have been quiet for so long, are rising up, and creating a civil war which causes a focus more on the people of the land being in control as opposed to the official government of the land.This is also a very dominant theme in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. In this novel, a Magistrate, whose name is never mentioned, has an identity struggle with his own race and the race his Empire controls. He realizes that the people he has control over around the village that he directs have had everything that once belonged to them taken away by the oppressor. He then feels the need to rise up against the Empire and help in the cause for the people. While he is doing this, he becomes the victim who is struggling to be freed from the chains of tyranny and injustice.At one point, when being tortured for his actions in defending who he terms as “barbarians,” the Magistrate wonders:What, after all, do I stand for besides an archaic code of gentlemanly behavior towards captured foes, and what do I stand against except the new science of degradation that kills people on their knees, confused and disgraced in their own eyes' Would I have dared to face the crowd to demand justice for these ridiculous barbarian prisoners with their backsides in the air' Justice: once that word is uttered, where will it end' Easier to shout No!(Coetzee Waiting 106).In this instance, the Magistrate struggles with helping the oppressed and aiding the oppressor. The oppressed would be what he is fighting for, the people of the land who create the anarchy in order to press toward the goal of liberation, so that they can one day be free of all chains. Stemming from anarchy, the idea of deconstruction is also emphasized in Coetzee’s works. In contrast to creation, the deconstruction of society is the center of Michael K. This novel takes place in a period of civil war and unrest among the peoples of the land.They are searching for freedom, and so they are breaking down the structure that keeps them in bondage. This structure, though rigid before, is failing to keep a stronghold on the inhabitants of the land. This structure is falling apart, thus “de-creating” the creation that is already in existence.Not only are the people the force behind the deconstruction of the oppressive structure in Coetzee’s works, but also the oppressors themselves contribute greatly in the deconstruction. If one would look at this in a more natural sense, the land that is already in existence before the colonizers came to conquer it has been created for inhabitants. The inhabitants already on that land are the people the land was created to shelter.When the colonizing parties came to take over the land, the process of deconstruction began. The “structure” they set up is actually what has become the center of deconstruction and the end to the rightful owners of the created land.Thus, the new creation becomes the deconstruction, which would also fit in with Coetzee’s writings, stressing the many years of oppression in the society he writes about. Both of these ideas on deconstruction fit in well with liberation and the people of the land struggling to regain the land that is rightfully theirs.Another key element involved in postmodern thought, and especially the works of J. M. Coetzee, is the idea of exhaustion and silence.These concepts play a very large role in Michael K. Michael’s character, although he has much to say in many different situations, often has repressed thoughts and actions. Usually he finds himself dumbfounded, at a loss for words, and will think that because of his low intellect the words just won’t be there to articulate if he opened up his mouth.At one point K was telling his story to some people at Jakkalsdrif who where sitting around a campfire. He talks about bring his mother to Prince Albert and working on the railways and everything is he’s done.However, he felt he could not finish: “There was a silence. Now I must speak about the ashes, thought K, so as to be complete, so as to have told the whole story. But he found that he could not, or could not yet” (Coetzee Michael 79).These instances happen throughout the entire novel. Sometimes the reason for remaining silent is intentional, sometimes it is merely because Michael K feels he cannot express the words.His time at Kenilworth, for example, is characterized by starvation and silence. Because he has done nothing wrong, K does not have much to say in regards to the time he spent at the Visagie farm. He tells his stories to the refugee camp doctor, but even then they are just tidbits of stories, and not a full narrative of his journey and what he has been doing at the Visagie residence. The doctor wants very badly to help K out, but K is not able to articulate in a convincing manner that he is innocent of any crime.Not only is K vocally silent, but he is also in a state of physical and emotional exhaustion.His body is weak and because of that, he can barely function.He has no desire to conform to the authority’s desires, and instead chooses silence. This silence is somewhat extended from his physical state, which is defined by exhaustion and weakness. K’s final answer to survival and making a statement is to run away from the refugee camp.Benita Parry discusses Coetzee’s theme of silence as marked by social power and ethnic heritage. She says, “the reader is simultaneously offered intimations of a non-linguistic intuitive consciousness, and is invited to witness the fruits of speechlessness when there is a failure of the dialectic between the ‘Imaginary” and the ‘Symbolic’” (Parry 154).Perry also states that as in Coetzee’s writing, silence isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For instance, in Michael K his inability to articulate leads to further insights into the visionary (Coetzee Michael 155). Coetzee’s silent characters are “not only ‘victims’ but also ‘victors’ accredited with extraordinary and transgressive psychic energies” (Parry 156).In Waiting for the Barbarians, the theme of silence is also a very dominant theme. The Magistrate is unable to communicate with a girl he is very much drawn to in a physical and emotional way, and instead communicates with tracing her body and physical touch. Parry describes this by saying that the Magistrate “cannot understand the gestures of the barbarian girl, and can communicate with her only in makeshift language without nuance, her body is a script to be decoded…” (Parry 156). Throughout the novel, the barbarian girl also does not say a word, until the very end when she speaks with the people of her tribe.This issue of exhaustion and silence characterizes a certain authority within the works of Coetzee’s fiction.The silence often denotes authority, especially in the case of the barbarian girl with the Magistrate. She has a certain hypnotic power over him, making him desire her more and more. In the case of Michael K, he has a certain authority over the refugee camp doctor. The doctor wants to help him, is obsessed with helping him, and is very much drawn to Michael.The two cases are similar in that they both reflect the outcast having power over the person whom is supposed to be in the authoritative position.This sense of being drawn to the silence leads to a certain longing for freedom. Each of these characters has the desire to overcome societal customs and aspire to achieve greater heights and expectations.Their silence is their cry for freedom.These various postmodernist themes are very helpful in understanding the issues of freedom and liberation in the novel.In the end, does Michael K “slip his chain” and achieve freedom' The ending, though very ambiguous and though it leaves one wondering what will happen next, does have somewhat of a rough conclusion. Michael K escapes the camps—he leaves the control of the oppressor and attains freedom by returning home.The group of travellers wants him to travel with him, but instead he goes back to his old home and fantasizes about going back to the farm and the shelter he had built there. As he is thinking about the country he is realizing that the thing he liked most about being there is that there is much time to do everything. He then wonders:(Is that the moral of it all, he thought, the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything' Is that how morals come, unbidden, in the course of events, when you least expect them') (Coetzee Michael 183).If there were a defined purpose to this novel, this thought would be it. Michael K dreams of the country, where he has found freedom and contentment and would like to return. Because Michael K has no desire for complex or material items, he enjoys the quiet and solitariness of the country.In the end, however, all he can do is dream.The plot of Coetzee’s novels represents a universal time and space. There is no specific moment in history and there is not a specific place in which his plots develop. Samuel Durrant describes this trait of Coetzee’s writing by observing,Rather than providing a direct historical relation of the conditions of apartheid, they instead provide a way of relating to such a history. They teach us that the true work of the novel consists not in the factual recovery of history, nor yet in the psychological recovery from history, but rather in the insistence on remaining inconsolable before history (Durrant 431).This universal historicity makes it possible to relate to many different societies in many different places. His novels suggest there is always a hope, a freedom that may only be achieved when one gets to the very heart of nature and creation.This freedom will always be a struggle and no matter how much freedom a person has, there is always something that will pull him or her down, an object of oppression.Coetzee may not necessarily deal with the end result of a problem, but, according to Nicholas Visser on Michael K, it “situate[s] presented action within the ‘troubles’ rather than in their aftermath” (Visser 69). The goal is not the point, rather, how one gets to the goal is the most important part of achieving liberation.J. M. Coetzee has a dream of liberation. Writing in a style common to postmodernist theory, he achieves this sense of liberation by exploring different dimensions and elements of postmodernist thought. In his novel, In the Life and Times of Michael K, these thoughts are represented by a play in the plot, including K’s spending much time wandering in certain areas for long periods of time doing nothing specific. Also included in Michael K is participation in the land and society, a sense of anarchy rather than hierarchy, and destruction.One of the biggest aspects of postmodernist thought is the theme of exhaustion and silence, which plays a dominant role in both Coetzee’s Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians.Coetzee’s style is significant and representative to South African writing because he stresses the importance of achieving freedom, not necessarily though the end goal, but through the journey that leads to the end goal.Coetzee’s “intimations of freedom” give people the hope to slip their chains and free themselves from the bondage of confinement and the oppressor.His chains of bondage have been given an intimation of hope.